


The Clock Strikes Noon (Apocolypse)

by mageofmind (renegadeartist)



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Events, Minimal editing, POV Second Person, Temporary Character Death, and this was created, basically I wondered what would happen if someone survived a little bit longer than everyone else, pov taako, the author only has a vague understanding of spells in d&d 5e, the eleventh hour episode 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 19:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8459518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renegadeartist/pseuds/mageofmind
Summary: “You’re going to be amazing,” she says, and she’s sincere and her tone reminds you of your mother, of your aunt, of all the good people in your life, of Merle when he tries, of Magnus when he cares too much, of little Angus when he sees past your jokes and tries to comfort you, of Sazed before you ruined it all. She looks so proud of all of you, and you think that maybe you could do it, whatever it is, or will be. Her eyes shift to meet yours, and she says, “I’m sorry,” before she disappears again, and time starts moving.





	

The temple was small and plain, but it had a high vaulted ceiling that made your neck hurt and your stomach drop when you tried to look all the way up. There’s not much in the way of decoration or ornamentation, but there are some diamonds glittering in simple engravings.

The room you’re in isn't big, and from what you can tell there’s only really one room in the whole temple. There’s a few pews, and an altar that's a plain stone of pale pink marble veined with gold. Behind it is a tapestry portraying a city cradled in the arms of a woman. If you’re being completely honest with yourself, you're not too impressed.  
  
You've seen bigger temples, more extravagant ones. A huge theater always bustling with people for Milil, huge libraries with books bound in fine leather and gold leaf for Oghma, a golden tree for Pan, with fruits made of cut gemstones, and statues reaching toward the sky, praying for forgiveness or deliverance or whatever it was people prayed to Pan for. You consider asking Merle for a split second, before you decide it doesn't actually matter that much.  
  
You'll all be dead in a few seconds, anyways.  
  
You look back, and you see the two brothers framed by fire, and as time goes on Redmond's cloak is eaten by fire, and his skin turns to smoke. He doesn't move, and you wonder if it's his faith keeping him there, or fear. You wonder if he was even aware of the explosion happening behind him at all.  
  
A voice, soft and comforting and the first thing that's actually felt right since you stepped into Refuge says, "Well, the three of you are just in time," and you finally notice the woman sitting on the stairs up to the pulpit. She's knitting, and her hair is silver, a different shade but not dissimilar to the color of the sky before a storm, or the steel of train tracks glimmering in the sun, but there's blue shimmering in there somewhere, and you know that this is a goddess, that this is Istus. (The tapestry behind her, _of_ her, admittedly helps you jump to this conclusion.) You didn't know what you expected, but the two needles in her hands that are tangled up in a long scarf is not something you'd anticipated.  
  
You know you should probably be amazed, that you should feel humbled or existential or something, but you've been through a lot, you've died more times than any person ever should, and you've never seen the appeal of gods anyways. You don't know what to say, so you default to your usual response, which is to hang back. You let Merle do the talking which, admittedly, probably isn't the best idea.  
  
The goddess laughs as Merle mispronounces her name - several times - and Magnus seems remarkably well put together while talking to a goddess.  
  
She motions for you all to sit on some pews, and you all but collapse into them, because the last hour has been draining.  
  
She talks about fate, and time being sick, and how you're dying. None of these things are particularly new, and you wonder what the point of coming here was again.

You pipe up only to crack a joke, and you wonder what the point of _you_ being here was again. Istus seems to think you’re funny, so maybe that’s a plus.

She reaches into her cloak and pulls out a pair of scissors. She cuts a piece of string from the scarf she’s knitting, and you feel intimidated, though you’re not entirely sure why. You figure that, when dealing with literal gods, it’s better to just go with the flow.

She calls you special, and something in your chest hurts, because the last person to say something like that, with that heartbreakingly sincere tone of voice, had left you after the biggest mistake of your life. And you’d spent so much time alone that you’d forgotten what it was like for someone to say something sincere, something heartfelt and honest to your face and mean it.

Then, she elaborates, and you feel stupid for feeling flattered. You ask for clarification, in your own roundabout way, and she says that you’ve been her agents for a long time.

“How long?” Magnus asks. “Two weeks?”

And Istus laughs and says, “A little bit longer than that.”

“Don’t say three weeks!” you interject, and that gets a chuckle from Magnus and your heart flutters.

Istus says that you’ve been working for her, in some weird, roundabout way, but that you’d goofed up with Phandalin, and again that’s not really news to anyone present, and you get the feeling that she knows this.

She asks you to make it formal, to become her emissaries in this world, and to stand in the way of forces that want to reshape creation in their image. You figure that’s not too bad, and it doesn’t hurt to have a goddess on your side, so you crack a joke and feel lighter than you have in a while, and you start to maybe understand why some people follow gods so closely.

If all the gods were as nice as Istus, you figure maybe there’s something to this whole religion thing.

You all accept her offer, and she gives you all gifts. Magnus gets the Chance Lance, Merle gets some kind of orb, and you get… a bag. Not as cool as the minute hand ripped from a huge clock tower that’s just crashed through the temple wall, but you’ll take it.

Istus edits things a bit, and she assures you that you’ll still have the item she gave you on the next reset. You hope the next reset is the last, because you don’t think you have the energy to keep going.

The wall behind you is buckling, the brothers are gone, and Istus says, “It looks like our time is up, my dears.”

Magnus asks, almost hungrily, “Is there anything else you could edit? In our past?”

Istus says she can’t, that it would unravel her, and Magnus looks maybe a little too disappointed to be thinking of something frivolous, and you wonder what exactly happened to Magnus to make him look like that. You remember something he said once, in Lucas’s lab, and you wonder if the look in his face, the extinguished spark and dark smudges in his skin, have anything to do with Julia.

Magnus quickly changes the subject, and asks for help with their quest. Istus obliges, but she seems to be in a hurry.

“I’ve one last blessing for you, my emissaries,” she says, and if a goddess could look like she’s falling apart at the seams, Istus is doing a very good job of it. “Your fate is guiding you, not today, not tomorrow, but to a moment that will challenge you in a new and horrible way. And I can’t make the difficult decision that lies at the end of your quest for you, but I can grant you the time that you need to make that decision.” Then, she disappears, and you wonder what she sees in your future – and Magnus’s and Merle’s – that’s so terrible. You’re not sure you want to know the answer.

You don’t expect her to, but she reappears fairly quickly, wiping a tear from her eye, and now you’re really scared of what’s to come, because the goddess of fate is crying for you, and that can’t be a good omen.

“You’re going to be amazing,” she says, and she’s sincere and her tone reminds you of your mother, of your aunt, of all the good people in your life, of Merle when he tries, of Magnus when he cares too much, of little Angus when he sees past your jokes and tries to comfort you, of Sazed before you ruined it all. She looks so proud of all of you, and you think that maybe you could do it, whatever it is, or will be. Her eyes shift to meet yours, and she says, “I’m sorry,” before she disappears again, and time starts moving.

The temple starts to collapse, and you face it unafraid, because you know you still have at least one more reset in you, that you have one more time to die before things go back to normal. Or, as normal as things ever are.

Then, you hear Merle shout something over the roar of the fire, and the large support beam that was holding up the roof stops a foot above your head, and there’s a dome around you, and the fire isn’t reaching you.

The only problem is it’s reaching everything – every _one_ – else.

“ _No!_ ” you shout, and you would have screamed, but your throat is closing because the fire is engulfing your friends, the wood and shrapnel is tearing them apart. You don’t know what Merle did or why he did what he did. All you know is that there’s some kind of shield around you, keeping the fire and the collapsing building away.

There’s fire creeping up the sides, but it’s not getting any hotter, and you feel like you’re watching something on a screen, something impersonal, like it’s happening to someone else’s life and not your own. You’re fairly certain the two dead bodies on the ground are your friends, are Magnus and Merle, and you feel bile rise in your throat, but it all happened so fast that you can’t know for sure, and you want to scream and cry, but you’re just standing there, frozen, useless, and suddenly you know why Istus said she was sorry.

And you understand what she said about fate, about interference unraveling her existence or some such bullshit, and you know she wouldn’t have been able to change this because it’s insignificant and small and just a moment, and it’s barely been thirty seconds, but it feels like years, because Magnus and Merle are dead and you can’t convince your mind that they’re coming back, that soon you’ll be with them again, at the entrance to Refuge, and Roswell will say whatever it is they say to visitors.

But there’s two bodies at your feet, outside of the shield, and one of them has a wooden arm that’s smoking heavily, and the other is too big and too warm and too _alive_ to be dead, and you don’t like the idea, you don’t like the sight, and that’s understandable, especially because they’re your family – and that’s something you hadn’t thought before, hadn’t allowed yourself to think before, for one reason or another, but it’s true.

They might not be your family by blood, but they’re your family through choice, and you think maybe that means more in the long run. You think that, maybe, in some other world where things were different it wouldn’t be impossible to think of Merle as your dad, or as Magnus as your brother. You wonder if they feel the same way, if they’ve even thought of it. You wonder if the memories of them, of who they are and what they do and the feeling of someone actually, genuinely caring about you is worth staring at a raging fire as it eats away at everything you’ve built up.

It’s the first time you think of your team as your family, and it’s when they’re dead, and when you can’t move, and there’s fire all around you and wood and stone crashing onto the shield.

And then, the shield flickers out, and everything goes white.

* * *

 

You wake up in front of Refuge, in front of Roswell, and you’re still crying.

You sit up, and you clap a hand over your mouth and try to stifle the sobs forcing their way out of your throat.

You feel a hand on your shoulder, and you look up and see Magnus. He looks concerned. “Hey, dude. What’s wrong?”

And Merle doesn’t say anything, his eyes are to the ground, and you know he knows what happened, and yet you know him well enough to also know that he’s not entirely sorry.

You can’t really arrange your thoughts right just yet, so you haul yourself to your feel with Magnus’s help and you look walk briskly up to Merle and you ask, “Why?”

And he’s worrying his lower lip, and his soulwood hand is twisting awkwardly, and he sounds slightly defensive, slightly guilty, as he said, “I couldn’t… stand the idea of you dying again without doing _something_.”

And you get it, kind of, but you still give Merle a good smack with your umbra staff.

He chuckles a little, and even though you know it’s not a joke and you’re going to have to deal with this later, somehow, you laugh too. “I guess I deserved that one, huh?”

“Yeah,” you say, and you don’t elaborate, because you can almost still feel the smoke in your throat, and Magnus looks slightly concerned, but he doesn’t press and you’re grateful for that.

Still standing under the sign, Roswell says, “Hello, visitors! Please identify yourselves.”

And then the loop is back, and they’re on a quest, and things are as normal as they ever are, and the thought rises back in your mind, unbidden, that these people are your family, and Merle isn’t the only one who can’t stand the idea of them dying.

But Magnus is a human, and Merle is old in his own right, and you know that if everything goes right, you’ll be the last one left, and you hate that thought, and you push it to the back of your mind, and you focus on finding Sheriff Isaac, the Temporal Chalice, and ending this loop once and for all.

**Author's Note:**

> Let's pretend that the spell Merle cast is pretty much Leomund's Tiny Hut if it was a completely different spell made to be nothing but a plot device and also he used his grimorie to prep the spell or something idk shhh just be sad about this d&d campaign with me. 
> 
> Also feel free to yell at me on [my tumblr](http://renegadeartist.tumblr.com/)  
> 


End file.
